The unlikely hero on a day of bravery and miracles

The sea is quiet. A handful of lugworm collectors are silhouetted against the breakers which don't even break, but simply surge gently in, and then retreat.

A little boat eases its way through the surf, beaching itself on the sand. A fisherman slowly lowers himself into the knee-deep water and plodges slowly through the shallows. He takes so much time walking the 100 or so metres up the beach to his old tractor that his mate in the boat urges him to get a move on, his voice blowing across the open sands.

The fisherman takes no notice, plodding deliberately towards the beach-head where the broken slats of the old wooden breakwaters jut out of the sand like ugly, decaying teeth.

Sixty years ago almost to the day, Company Sergeant-Major Stanley Elton Hollis of the 6th Battalion of the Green Howards took almost the same route.

There was, of course, a little more urgency in his stride and it resulted in him being the only one of the 156,000 troops who landed on that "longest day" to win the Victoria Cross - the supreme award for bravery.

CSM Hollis was born in Loftus on the east Cleveland coast in 1912, a couple of years before the start of the First World War. His father was a fishmonger and in 1926 the family moved to Robin Hood's Bay where young Stan worked in his father's fish shop.

When he was 17, he set out on his own, learning to be a navigation officer for a Whitby shipping company. He made regular voyages to west Africa where, in 1930, he caught blackwater fever, so he had to stay at home.

His parents now owned a fish shop in Beaumont Road, North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, and so he put down roots there, becoming a lorry driver, marrying Alice Clixby and having a couple of children.

All very ordinary, until in 1939 he joined the Green Howards, first as a reservist but when war broke he was mobilised. His 6th Battalion was recruited almost entirely from Teesside, and it travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force only to be evacuated at Dunkirk.

It was part of 50th Division which was made up of men from the North-East. They wore on their arm a bright red flash of TT for Tyne Tees and Hollis was with them as they fought through Iraq, Palestine and Cyprus. He was there at El Alamein and, promoted to Company Sergeant-Major, took part in the invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Early morning, June 6, 1944, found him in a landing craft off the fisherman's empty beach. To the Green Howards it was known as King Beach, a section of Gold Beach, and it was full of wooden defences designed to prevent ships from landing. Mines were attached to the posts and nests of machine guns hidden in the dunes provided a deadly welcome.

With missiles from the Royal Navy ships and bombs from the Halifax planes rocketing overhead, plus machine gun fire from the top of the beach, it was hellishly noisy when CSM Hollis jumped out of his landing craft at 7.37am.

His company, D Company, landed in deep water, but the aerial bombardment had cleared the way for them. Under sporadic fire - but still lethal for the unlucky - they made it speedily across the beach minefield, and quickly overran a defensive gun battery at the beach-head. The Green Howards were some of the first troops off the beaches on D-Day.

A straight sandy lane leads off the beach today. It heads over a boggy piece of ground populated by wispy willow thickets which conceal nothing more dangerous than a cuckoo.

Here, Hollis and the rest of D Company must have re-grouped. Wet, but still alive. Their eyes would have followed the straight sandy lane over the boggy ground and then up a steep hill called Mont Fleury. The fisherman's old red tractor, towing the boat behind it, has also made it off the beach and struggles up the rise. It kicks up a sandstorm as it veers out of the tyre tracks to avoid a small boy coming down the hill. He has two whole baguettes and one half-eaten one sticking out of his backpack.

Having succeeded up the incline, the tractor turns right and disappears into a modern estate of holiday homes and retirement cottages which boast wonderful sea views.

In Hollis' day, there was only one house there. From his training, he knew it had a distinctive, circular drive. He also knew that behind it was the fiercesome Mont Fleury battery which he hoped had been destroyed in advance by the RAF.

He would also have known that what in peacetime are wonderful sea views in wartime are superb defensive positions.

Hollis was particularly concerned about a building to the right of the house with the circular drive.

"It's only a bloody bus shelter, Sarn't Major," shouted one of his company.

The Sergeant Major wasn't so easily put off. With his Company Commander, Major Ronnie Lofthouse who himself won a Military Medal that day, he got within 20 yards of the 'bus shelter' when a machine-gun was pushed through a slit and opened up. It was point blank range, a deadly hail of bullets.

Most normal people would have thrown themselves to the floor and prayed to their god, but Hollis instantly rushed straight at the box, recharging his magazine as he ran.

Miraculously, he reached it. He jammed his rifle through the slit and fired inside. Then he jumped on top and lobbed in a grenade. When it exploded, he jumped back down and burst through the door.

Two Germans lay dead. The rest were either wounded or dazed and gave themselves up. Hollis had saved his Company from inevitable slaughter as the Germans would have waited until the Green Howards had passed by and then turned on them from the rear.

Rather than return to his men, Hollis wondered where the trench led. Nowadays, it would cut through the musically-themed housing estate - the pill-box was roughly where Rue Claude Debussey joins Rue Mozart. Hollis followed the trench as it went up Rue Debussey, with Rue JS Bach on the right and Rue Chopin on the left. These are now retirement homes - an elderly German owns the house with the circular drive - with trim gardens defended by dogs whose snarling snouts press beneath the gates.

Back then it was farmland, and the trench led Hollis to a second pill-box. But it wasn't defended by snarling Germans. Indeed, these Germans, faced by a single armed Middlesbrough man, gave themselves up. Hollis' prisoner count rose to about 20.

To rejoin his Company, he took a farm track passed the hulking ruin of the Mont Fleury gun battery, which had been successfully bombed by the RAF. The farm track, back on the musical note, is now called Alle H Berlioz - the blue street sign is screwed on to the remains of the gun battery.

There are mortar marks and shell holes in the 5ft-thick concrete, and it provides shelter for three horses and a parking place for the old red tractor that the fisherman has driven off the beach.

Although the new village of Mont Fleury commemorates Mozart, Debussey, Back, Chopin, Ravel, Franck and Berlioz, nowhere is there mention of a Hollis.

Hollis rejoined his company. It was a little after 8am. D-Day was far from over. The Green Howards had to crack on to the small village of Crpon - a dusty collection of farms behind tall walls overseen by a solid stone church. In the shadow of the church, there is now a monument to the Green Howards who lost their lives in the Normandy campaign.

Crpon was quickly cleared, but Hollis was detailed to a farmhouse on the edge of the village. Inside, he found a very scared ten-year-old boy; outside, he noticed an orchard and a couple of dogs happily waving their tails at the hedge.

A bullet whistled into the masonry above his head and he realised that hidden in the hedge beside the dogs was a German field gun,.

Taking two men and a PIAT anti-tank gun with him, he crawled through a rhubarb patch towards the German weapon. He fired, but fell short, and had given his position away. The Germans slowly cranked their weapon around until Hollis was looking straight down its barrel.

The shell roared over his head and into the farmhouse wall behind. Hollis ordered his men to retreat and then followed them back through the rhubarb. Only when he reached the wall, he realised that his men had failed to budge and they were coming under increasingly heavy machine fire.

To distract the Germans' attention, Hollis charged into the orchard, shooting from the hip and shouting at the top of his voice. Naturally, the enemy turned their fire on him - giving his two men time to escape from the rhubarb patch.

With deadly fire whizzing all around, Hollis somehow made it out of the orchard and back to the safety of the farmhouse wall.

It was 11am, and the Sergeant Major had completed his second miracle of the day.

The Green Howards pushed on inland towards Creully and beyond, but word must have begun filtering back because on August 17, 1944, the London Gazette announced that Hollis was the only soldier to be awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions on D-Day.

The citation read: "Wherever the fighting was heaviest, CSM Hollis appeared and, in the course of a magnificent day's work, he displayed the utmost gallantry and on two separate occasions his courage and initiative prevented the enemy from holding up the advance at critical stages.

"It was largely through his heroism and resource that the Company's objectives were gained and casualties were not heavier, and by his own bravery he saved the lives of many of his men."

His war ended a month later when he was wounded in the leg.

He returned to Middlesbrough to work as a sandblaster in a steelworks before becoming a partner in Horobin's motor repair business in Darlington. He then spent four years sailing in the Far East as a Third Engineer, before becoming a pub manager with Vaux. He ran the Green Howard in North Ormesby from 1955 to 1970 and, after its demolition, the Holywell View in Liverton Mines near Loftus.

He died in 1972, aged 59, and was buried in Acklam Cemetery. Ten years later his medals were auctioned for £32,000 and in 1997 they were presented to the Green Howards Museum in Richmond.

It is understood that his daughter and son will commemorate the 60th anniversary of his bravery in Normandy this weekend. With monarchs, presidents and prime ministers also in attendance, the beaches will once again be noisy and crowded - but nothing like the hell Hollis lived through so bravely in June 1944.

* With thanks to Roger Chapman of the Green Howards Museum, Richmond